Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

On Sat 05 Jan 2019 at 02:23:59 +0000, smf wrote:
> Some people claim the labels just described how they were formatted, as if
> people didn't know how to format them when they opened the box.
> 
> With the plethora of different systems available that would have required
> formatting anyway, then it seems a largely pointless exercise if it's true.

I don't think I have seen pre-formatted floppies until after the
introduction of 90mm (3 1/2 thumbs) floppies. Probably not even in their
first years. They were always MS-DOS formatted. I always presumed that
that was because the IBM PC compatibles had become popular even amongst
people who didn't even know how to format a floppy. (If 90 mm disks had
been formatted from the beginning, it probably would have been Apple
Macintosh format)

(I suppose that earlier, mainframe and mini vendors like IBM and Digital
Equipment Corporation might have sold pre-formatted floppies at a
premium, possibly because they made it difficult for the user to format
them themselves. Or maybe they only did that with hard disks.)

-Olaf.
-- 
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert  -- "What good is a Ring of Power
\X/ rhialto/at/falu.nl      -- if you're unable...to Speak." - Agent Elrond